Why did it need to be a stealth startup? It looks like they thought they had a great idea, but instead of being first to market, they went stealth and let facebook be first.
From what I observed in YC, launching a TechCrunch article typically doesn't lead to a ton of inbound interest (at least for B2B companies this is true - if you're Uber/Vine/Tinder/Grouper, it's a different story).
For B2B companies, press helps get investor attention, can help with inbound hiring, and can potentially help get clients, if your press releases are well targeted enough (which most aren't).
From our perspective, staying quiet was the default. Now we're at the point where we're interested in reaching a slightly broader audience.
Also, I would think in-app purchase pricing would be relatively inexpensive. I guess I don't see who they're targeting... the target company would need substantially-priced in-app purchases to justify the cost of even traditional advertising.
Wish them well though!
Not sure what you mean. Why does in-app purchase pricing have to be inexpensive? Why does it matter if it does? Traditional advertising is substantially more expensive than mobile advertising.
The reason a company would be interested in this is because someone who has your app installed (say Uber, to take one of the apps that enables transactions on my phone as an example) is one of the highest value customers you can reach in terms of likelihood to make a purchase (they installed your app, so it's akin to someone entering your store).
It seems like Facebook sees the same thing happening.
Of course, I am curious to see how this affects game developers - I've encountered a few who have rolled their own retargeting solutions on top of house ads. It seems like game developers are especially reluctant to pay for anything except to pump up their install count in order to reach the top of app store rankings (seems like using SEM to boost your SEO).
Any predictions?
As far as game developers, the SEM for SEO strategy is the TapJoy model and it sucks for people who play. One thing I think deep linking could start to do for developers is allow them to cannibalize each other (say Angry Birds started advertising in Candy Crush Saga to people who spent over $X/week and had Angry Birds installed, I know this probably isn't the best example, but it is descriptive at least). Does that push game devs away from allowing in app ads from other game companies?